Geek Love

By: Katherine Dunn

Narrated by: Christina Moore

Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's summary

No one wants to be a victim, but most find the event too hypnotic to ignore. In order to save their traveling carnival from bankruptcy, the Binewskis are creating their own brood of sideshow freaks. Under Al's careful direction, the pregnant Lil ingests radioisotopes, insecticides, and arsenic to make her babies "special". As the oldest daughter, albino dwarf Olympia, puts listeners in the ring-side seat, her family's incredible drama erupts and spills over into the "normal" world.

Not for the squeamish or faint of heart, this brilliantly daring novel is shocking and delightful. Christina Moore's vibrant narration conspires with Katherine Dunn's evocative, energetic prose to shock us at seeing something of ourselves in these exotic characters.

©1998 Katherine Dunn (P)1999 Recorded Books

Best Book You've Never Heard Of.

An incredibly weird and twisted family drama that takes place during the time when side show carnivals consisted of a bearded lady, lion tamers, and sword swallowing displays comes a true family of "geeks". This is a dark and unique tale filled with family drama on a realm I never could have pictured on my own. I can not express how much I love this book, it is something I've reread physically as well as listened to a few handfuls of times and I enjoy it more and more every time. The narration is superb and the characters are appallingly interesting. A must read for anyone looking for a unusual read.

A weird and twisted family story

I love this book. I read it years ago and just finished the audible version and am so happy I went through it again as an adult. The narration is exceptional and the story makes me feel a little bit better about my weird family.

This book did not meet my expectations

What did I just listen too?

Really it was part Adams Family without all the love and affection, part Texas Chainsaw part Midsomer with the strange cult added in for fun?

I really wanted to love this book Freak Show was one of my favorite seasons of American Horror Story but the story here kept tripping over its own feet. Freak sex, immaculate conception, cult amputation, rape, murder, and necrophilia are some of the happenings so if you are triggered by any of these tread lightly.

I am not a prude I enjoy a good horror/thriller but this one the story did not make any sense to me. Rape put into a story just for shock and the rape of a circus freak at that is just cliché. The story did not flow at all and to tell you the truth several spots felt forced. I did enjoy several of the sub stories that were told about the traveling circus family. I wanted more of the story set in the present time with Oly and Miranda her daughter. The present plotline was the best part of the book and it was such a small portion of it. I read that Tim Burton purchased the movie rights to this and all I can think is what is the story he is going to tell? Tragic Tragedy is the only way I could describe this book. That being said I probably would have loved it at 16 years old.

The one bright spot is I though the narrator was terrific.

So good!

What an amazing story and world! I’m so glad that I finally got to this book, it was a journey!

Characters of the story were well developed and enduring.

A tale of family, what makes a family, love, and the lengths we go to protect our children.

'Geek Love' Lives Up to Its Reputation

'Geek Love' is a rare piece of fiction, one that lives up to its highest praise and proves wrong its detractors. Of all the novels and stories I have read that are included in the growing cannon of "transgressive fiction", 'Geek Love' is both the greatest of those works, and the one that is most truly transgressive. It is a novel that explores what it means to be a freak. What is a freak? Who makes somebody a freak? How does a person become a freak? What is the life of a freak like? Do freaks love? Why are so-called normal people both repelled and grotesquely attracted to freaks? Katherine Dunn explores all of these questions and more with a refreshing candor and a remarkable amount of compassion.

Aside from being a powerful exploration of freakdom, the novel is also the chronicle of a family that is, in their own highly unorthodox way, as all-American as any other. As I listened, I experienced both the thrill of their rise and the pain of their disturbing disintegration.

Where Christina Moore, the narrator of this title, is concerned: I do not think I have ever heard a more lively or enthralling performance of an audiobook. Christina Moore brings each character to life through changes in pitch, cadence, tone, and diction. Her voice captures and conveys perfectly the range of emotions felt by the characters and draws the listener into the story, appropriately enough, like a slick and experienced pitch-man.

After listening to the final words of this novel, you may be disturbed, you may be heart-broken, but you will most definitely not be the same as you were when you started. That is a guarantee from my lips to your ears. So plunk down your two bits and step on in because you won't believe what you're about to see.

Beautifully Flawed Characters & Story

Which character – as performed by Christina Moore – was your favorite?

What a great job. There's a dash of Holly Hunter here and a voice that never gets old, either in its reading of our main character or its performances of others.

Any additional comments?

Review of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love

For much of this weird and generally wonderful novel, I got the central conflict wrong. I thought this was – as the title and its ‘freak show’ setting imply – about accepting difference. I thought it was a provocative but ultimately conventional claim, that there’s a goodness and decency in accepting the other.

As it turns out, though, this novel more or less takes for granted that convention. Everyone accepts a fundamental notion of difference, at least everyone who comes into its orbit. The more troubling question turns out to be how one feels about physicality, about the body and flesh. And that turns out to be a more compelling conflict than a trite one between difference and ‘normalcy.’

I like almost all of this, but my favorite part is the magnificent opening sequence. We learn, seamlessly, that Al and Lil, have made the freak show, “the fabulon,” their family, and vice-versa. When hard times hit, they made the calculated decision to breed a family of midway acts. Lillian took all sorts of drugs and radioactive materials in order to alter her children, and she gives birth, in succession, to Artie the Aquaboy, a pair of conjoined twins, our narrator, Ollie, who’s an albino dwarf, and Chick, the telekinetic.

The heart of that opening sequence, though, is the great love and acceptance within the family. Al calls the children his “dreamlets,” and, despite the horror under the notion that the parents have induced birth defects, it’s a celebration of a great and physical love. (The prose description of Lillian as a young circus geek is worthy of a frame. Against my habit, I went back and re-read it just because it’s so lyrical.) These aren’t characters who are concerned about being ‘different.’ They are defiant in celebrating the wonder that they embody.

That ethos – or, if you prefer, that philosophy or that way of being – casts itself over the novel through that opening scene and through Ollie’s embrace of it. Like most of her siblings, she has inherited her father’s deep sense of wonder at the potential in human beings. It meets its opposite from two extremes.

On the one hand, Artie slowly develops a theory that ‘freakishness’ – particularly of his variety – is superior to the alternatives. His difference, his limbless aquatic muscularity, is the only kind that matters. Others should aspire to be like him. While the whole family looks down on “norms” who have no particular unusual physical characteristics, he takes it to an extreme. He cultivates insecurity in the people who come to him. He manipulates them into seeing their physical selves as a source of their unhappiness. (And, eventually, he turns to their mental selves as well.) He becomes a prophet of surgery against self. He supplants Al as head of the show, but he also supplants his philosophy of wonder with a philosophy of anti-body, of anti-flesh.

I’d spoil things to say how all that wraps up, but Artie’s philosophy meets its cousin in the person of Miss Lick, a wealthy heiress who – years later as part of a second plot woven (with some awkwardness) into the flashback portions – makes a fetish of removing or altering the birth ‘defects’ of others. She acts in the spirit of a condescending charity, but she’s motivated by a desire to make or remake others. Less like Al – who wanted to awaken dreams – and more like Artie, who wanted to impose a perverse sameness on the world, she pushes against possibility and toward the pre-fab quality of the frozen-dinner world in which she was raised as queen.

It’s only toward the end that that fundamental opposition comes into focus. Ollie, in her basic decency, loves Artie as much as he expects to be loved. She’s also drawn to Miss Lick even though she seeks her out to try to protect her daughter Miranda from her surgical predations. Even that opposition is complicated, though. Simple acceptance – as I’m tempted to characterize Al and Ollie’s perspective – does pale before Artie and Miss Lick’s calls for self-improvement. Ollie has achieved little in life, largely because she has so easily accepted the role everyone has cast for her. Artie and Miss Lick have a shared point; difference doesn’t just happen. Even the family is the product of a planned drug and radiation method. We are individual expressions of the species, but we are also the result of decisions we and others have made. It’s a complicated cycle, and there’s no clear resolution to it.

Throughout it all, the writing here shines, but I did get frustrated by some of the organization. On a page by page basis, this is a master class. More broadly, though, I wanted to see a more thoughtful braiding of the two narrative threads. We get a glimpse of the “now” of Miss Lick as soon as the second section of the novel, but we often go long stretches without returning to it. At a narrative level, the “now” passages get set up to resolve the entire story, but then they become so few and far between that they eventually fizzle. When we return to them at the end, they feel artificial. The real energy is all in the past, and it becomes hard to accept it as the end. There’s simply much less at stake in the conflict with Miss Lick; we haven’t gotten close enough to it for it to bear the weight of the conclusion.

In a similar vein, as wonderful a voice as Ollie’s is, she isn’t good at narrating change. She describes memorably and beautifully, but Dunn comes increasingly to depend on the notes of a reporter to fill in the changes in the story. It’s as if Ollie is made for us to marvel at, as if she is complete in herself. She simply doesn’t work as well at describing change.

If I squint, I can see this narrative misshapenness as reflecting the misshapenness of its characters. These are bodies that don’t fit together all that well, so why shouldn’t their story come to us in a form that rejects the organic shape of the conventional novel?

In the end, though, as much as I love the ideas and language here, that seems a too generous reaction, and I can’t quite overlook the structural issues. The arrogant inner editor in me kept wishing I could have helped put together a final draft, if I couldn’t have urged her to move a few sections around, limit some of the flashback, and expand some of the now.

I still think of this as a “five-star” novel, and I think parts of it will stick with me a long time. It’s so close to being even stronger, though, that I think I’ll recall its flaws for a good while, too. And maybe that really is part of the point.

All time favorite

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Everyone I love, loves this book.

What did you like best about this story?

It is heartbreaking, otherwordly. The weirdos' bible.

What about Christina Moore’s performance did you like?

I've read a hard copy of this book more times than I can recall and I have never been so transported as when I listened to Ms Moore read it to me.

amazing

such a good book amazing and talented reader her voice is made the book better I have read this in paper form several times but the performance really made this book come alive for me thanks

not sure what all the fuss is about

a few people in my book club really loved this book, and ask me to at least listen to it. I struggled to be interested in this genre. however was thoroughly impressed with this author's ability to make up a story based on the subject. and her ability to describe things interesting Lee enough to make me want to listen. I thought it was well performed. but it's definitely not a book that I would recommend.